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Mike, you're one of my favourite commenters on HN. But this is one of your concepts that I've never been able to wrap my head around. Specifically: >....business-driven software engineering. It does not work. My interpretation "business-driven software engineering" (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is one where business determines the requirements of the software. But if business doesn't drive those requirements, who will? You've repeatedly shown how terrible the typical dev is at business, and most devs would seemingly cozy up to their IDE rather than navigate the mess that is determining requirements. So who's gonna do it? Besides, which dev doesn't hate a fuzzy spec? Additionally, or perhaps more fundamentally, a business hires devs to the ends of furthering their, well, business objectives. What, exactly, is so wrong with business setting the agenda of what gets built? I ask because of a lesson I learned early (and painfully) in my career as a sysadmin. Technology exists for the business - Not the other way around. Unless, of course, you're a tech firm, where tech itself is your business. And even then, a business has to make economic sense, and as a programmer, I think I'm allowed to say we typically make poor economic choices. McLeod 'Clueless', if you will. |
I don't think that it's good when the business (usually, this means the executives) do it unilaterally. Obviously, it's not good for engineers to build with no concern whatsoever as to whether they're building something useful. It needs to be a collaboration focused around letting each side do what it's good at.
I'd like to believe that enough of us have sufficient business sense that we don't need the Agile-style waterfall (no, that's not a contradiction) in which requirements flow from business into "product" into technology. Not all of us make sound economic choices, but I think that a large part of that comes from the fact that most companies promote people with any business sense "out of IT".
As one who's trying to look forward for us as technologists, I guess I'd say that we need to take some responsibility for learning business and politics. The head-in-sand strategy is bad for us individually, but also bad for us as a group.